Social Value Marketplace

The Social Value Marketplace

Introduction

The Social Value Marketplace is an online platform promoted by the Social Value Portal (“SVP”). While SVP itself is a digital platform for reporting and measuring social value, the Marketplace is designed to be a complementary platform which facilitates the delivery of social value. The concept is simple – on the one hand, there are groups and organisations which would benefit from social value initiatives, while on the other there are organisations that can provide the resources to make this happen. The Marketplace is there to make this happen by enabling groups and organisations to register and post either offers or requests for resources.

Over time, it is intended that multiple Marketplaces in different locations will be able to link up in order to share resources and ideas.

Why is it needed?

Businesses may be committed to the concept of social value and willing to donate resources to support this commitment but find can it difficult to identify and engage with projects that meet their criteria and that they know will have an impact. On the other hand, charities and community projects, particularly at a local level, can find it challenging to raise their profile so that they access the resources business can offer. The Social Value Marketplace is a simple and effective way of enabling social value transactions to happen, by using an offers and “ask” system to enable social value “exchanges” to take place.

How will the Marketplace be used?

These are the key parameters for the Marketplace:

It is a moderated platform, so parameters will be set that define whether projects, offers of resources or organisations can qualify to be posted. The Social Value Portal will be responsible for ensuring that these parameters are observed.

The Social Value Portal will also be responsible for helping to increase and direct traffic to the Marketplace.

The Marketplace will be defined geographically so that there is an effective matching up of asks and resources according to location. This could be by local authority or by region. Individual Marketplaces can be further subdivided into smaller geographical regions if required.

This is intended to be a model which larger organisations (most often businesses but perhaps also larger public sector bodies from time to time) pay for, through sponsorship to establish the platform and / or through a usage fee.

Providers of services to the Marketplace will derive revenue from a fixed management fee. Any surpluses arising through volume should be reinvested in the improvement of the Marketplace.

A condition of participation in the Marketplace will be the provision of feedback by successful participants in a social value “exchange”. This is important so that the Marketplace’s sponsors can measure the impact of the Marketplace.

The Marketplace will not, in its initial phase at least, handle financial contributions. It is intended for exchanges of non-financial resources.

Technology and design

The platform has been developed by a team of developers called Minted Box, initially on behalf of Surrey County Council, for whom they have run a prototype Marketplace for over a year. It is in effect a “white label” solution that can be customised to meet specific needs, with pages for registration of participating groups and posting of specific projects or offers of support. It will also have a geospatial mapping feature.

Minted Box will host the site and provide support under a Service Level Agreement plus additional out of scope professional support where appropriate. Surrey CC will be also using the Marketplace in conjunction with their Orbis shared services partnership (which also includes Brighton & Hove and East Sussex councils). It is as a result of SVP’s relationship with Surrey CC that we are able to access the platform so cost effectively.

The unbranded version of the Marketplace looks like the screenshot below. This will be customised to meet specific project needs. This is the Minimum Viable Product (“MVP”) version. The platform is ready to launch once customisation is complete. We expect that additional content or functionality will be added as usage increases – possibilities include: a knowledge-sharing page; social value “scoring”; mapping offers and asks against datasets such as SIMD, etc.

Please get in touch at info@socialvalueportal.com or click the button below to get details of pricing options for the platform, customisation, and management/moderation of your Social Value Marketplace solution.